‘Charles’, a magazine publisher, wrote these comments at this blog yesterday:
On 17 November 2007 we will be allocating newsagent numbers for our December 2007 issue.
We will be doing so based on final sales figures for our September 2007 issue.
That’s correct, sales figures 2 months out of date.
Charles says much more than what I have reproduced here so be sure to read Charles’ full comments, my original post and comments from others here.
I have lifted these sentences from Charles’ comments because they deserve special attention. They highlight a problem for publishers and newsagents – we are being deliberately kept in the dark. I have been contacted by at least eight independent publishers this year with the same complaint – lack of timely sales data from their distributor.
Magazine distributors have sales data from hundreds of IT compliant newsagents and this is enough for publishers to set print runs rather than using data which is two months old. Why this daily sales data is not provided to publishers daily is beyond me.
I’d be glad to help independent publishers with this. There may be ways around magazine distributors not releasing sales data until two months later. Contact me here.